One of the most important aspects of digital marketing is social media marketing. A prominent platform in social media marketing is Instagram. The numerous, diverse features available on the platform make it one of the best fits for marketers to invest their time and efforts to promote their brand and reach out to maximum customers. Amidst all the features on Instagram to build your brand Instagram Stories is one of the best ways to boost engagement levels and drive traffic in your profile. With around 1 billion monthly users as indicated by empirical evidences, it is also found that around 500 million people use Instagram stories everyday. Thus you can estimate the engagement rates and traffic driven by this tool making it an ideal choice for brands to utilize it.

Here is a guide as to how brands can take advantage of Instagram stories in multiple ways for their demographics:-

• Interacting with the audience:- one of the most prominent use of Instagram stories is to facilitate interaction with your audience. The features such as hashtags, polls, GIFs, stickers, geographical location tracking can easily promote brand engagement if you are creative and unique in utilising such features for the best of your brand. Your stories last for about 24 hours which can be really advantageous for your brand. Instagram stories are discoverable even by people who do not follow you. You can use this opportunity to reach out to new people and explore your content. If you have a business account then you can also use Swipe-up links which is great for generating traffic in your profile. Also if you are about to launch a new campaign you can create some suspense and interact with your audience to keep them updated. This will help to build strong and healthy relations with your customers.

• Maintain visibility:- the stories of users whom you follow on Instagram, appear on the top of your feed with a red ring indicating that the user has published a new one. The story will be available for 24 hours on your feed. If your brand has a new product, wants to re-run an existing campaign or just promote sales of their product then you can definitely resort to advertising via Instagram stories. This will promote visibility because visuals in a story can intrigue people to learn more thereby lead them to visit your profile once which can widen your potent customer base. Also Instagram stories are a way to maintain your activity status shows which reveals that you are an active user on the platform.

• Transparency:- another way to connect with your audience via Instagram stories is through the level of transparency offered by it. Your brand can be open and upfront with your audience through Instagram stories due to the short lived and easily accessible feature of it. You can give your audience insights of you daily work life or behind the scene actions of a product launch to give a taste and knowledge of your work environment as well as do justice to the people working behind the scenes of a product campaign by appreciating their efforts. This will create deeper bonds and long term relationships with your customers or even employees even by keeping your feed mainstream yet expressing gratitude and fondness by Instagram stories.

• Provides a real-time marketing experience:- one of the major advantages of Instagram stories for a brand is that it provides an in-depth knowledge of a real-time marketing experience. The strategy focuses on creating relevant and current content for your customers which will keep your audience engaged. Also feedback from customers is an important part of marketing strategy for a brand. Stories will provide you important details about the experience of customers so that you can make necessary changes in your product to enhance user satisfaction. The feature of polls in your story will empower your brand to ask your customers anything about the kind of content they would wish to see from your brand on social media, their favourite kind of sales or some necessary changes that should be incorporated so as to enhance customer satisfaction. Knowing and giving value to their opinions would create a feeling of mutual importance and oneness. Hence this kind of marketing would essentially yield better and faster results by growing your brand with the support of audience. Also it will keep your audience interested and engaged with your content.

• Promote your lead generation and drive sales:- all digital marketers aim to humanize skills and strategies to generate leads and drive sales which are the basic objectives. This visual storytelling tool can significantly boost your conversion rates by adding swipe-up links. It allows your brand to add links for all the images and videos you add to your story which makes it really simple for the user who just needs to swipe up for making a purchase. This will channel your sales funnel directly through Instagram. It further eliminates all hassles for the customer to make a purchase by visiting the website of the company thereby facilitating impulse buy where you can make a purchase with just a swipe-up. This is extremely effective for a brand as it tempts the user to make an instant purchase.

• Promote Instagram influencer and brand endorsement ideas:- today majority of influencers choose Instagram as their favourite platform to promote brand endorsements. When a brand collaborates with an influencer, they offer them a free or discounted product so that their followers can shop for a discount and promote the product through Instagram stories. Marketers especially from beauty, fashion or fitness industry opt for such promotional ideas. This will drive more engagement and audience to your brand thereby building a strong online presence.

• Implement ads through Instagram stories:- the unparalleled targeting propensity of these ads can draw audience categorically depending upon their interests, preferences, behaviour, demographics, language or location. Ads on Instagram stories are smooth as they easily transition from one story to another without realizing that they are seeing ads. Also these ads include a swipe-up link which allows users to shop their favourite products. Also Instagram and Facebook share the same advertising platform where both have the same ad-platform. Hence it adds on to the exposure levels of both the platforms.

• Responds to direct messages:- a direct message is a message which is sent personally to someone on the platform. This facilitates personal interaction between the brand and its customers. Often companies have a large inflow of such messages where most of which gets ignored. This is a major setback because companies fail to correspond with someone who might be their potent customers. Below each story which does not have a link a message bar is displayed which enables users to directly send a message to the brand. This is detrimental in bridging the gap between the brand and the customer by keeping a personal touch because it is important for marketers be responsive towards customer behaviour. When you are actively involved in Instagram stories then you should devise a strategy for responding to these direct messages on time too.

The algorithm metrics on Instagram keep on changing frequently. You need to prepare strategies and plans that would carefully optimise these tools available on the platform for the best of your brand because it unfolds a wide array of options which could give the much needed boost and traffic to your brand on the platform.

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